The Dirt (74 page)

I
think the band always blamed Pamela for influencing me to leave. They called her motherfucking Yoko and set up a dartboard with her face on it in their dressing room. But she never told me to leave. Yeah, she could see the dysfunction in the band. But every decision I ever made musically, I always made on my own. The fact that I left the band never should have been a surprise to Nikki; I had told him reams of times, but I guess he just didn’t want to really believe it after all we’d been through.

For some reason, Nikki and Pamela never clicked, which was always fucked up to me because she introduced Nikki to Donna. She whipped out her cupid’s arrow, shot them both, and it’s been puppy love ever since. I think Vince had issues with Pamela too, because he claimed they had fucked, though she says they never did. But he was never as angry as Nikki, who to this day, hates Pamela’s guts.

I used to feel that way myself: after the divorce and sitting around helpless while she hooked up with her ex, I told myself that there was no fucking way. I accepted as gracefully as I could the fact that I had been fired. Whenever I came by for the boys, she’d have the nanny of the week bring the kids out and pretend like she wasn’t home.

But, just like with Bobbie Brown, Pamela and I couldn’t stay away from each other. First, she suddenly started calling me again when I was dating Carmen. Then, one afternoon when I went to pick up the boys, the nanny wasn’t there and Pamela came out instead. Instantly, we both felt, despite everything we’d been through, the magic, the initial attraction that had brought us together that New Year’s Eve five years before. After that, each time I went over for the kids, we’d kick it a little bit—until one day we found ourselves kicking it in her bed. Then I started staying the night, and spending more and more time with her until we were practically married again. I asked her to move back to my place, and that day she went to the court, bro, and finally withdrew my restraining order. We even planned to remarry on Valentine’s Day.

But we quickly fell into the old patterns because we had never really dealt with our issues. It was hard to get her to talk about them, which made our attempts at therapy a complete waste. Instead of working on things, she liked to give ultimatums, like, “If you drink, I can’t be with you.” The little boy that was me before jail hated ultimatums, but now I tried to accept them as part of her personality. At the same time, however, there were so many mines in our relationship we hadn’t defused that we both ended up tiptoeing around each other so as not to fucking explode any.

It all fell apart for us again on New Year’s Eve. We were sitting on our asses watching TV and I said, “You know what, it’s New Year’s Eve. It’s the fifth anniversary of when we met and tomorrow is going to be another fucking millennium. Let’s have a shot of Goldschläger for old times’ sake, chill in the Jacuzzi, and have a good time.” She agreed. For a few days afterward, when we had some time alone, we’d sneak a drink together and veg out.

But afterward she freaked because by drinking we had stepped on one of those mines. “Oh my God,” she kept saying. “I can’t believe I drank with you. I’m not supposed to be doing this.” And so when the guilt came back, the drama of the past followed. Just as all this was going down, I had to split for a tour with Methods of Mayhem. When I returned home, she was out of town on a television shoot. We kept missing each other, and the distance and lack of communication were destroying us. And then, on Valentine’s Day, I was fired again. Out of the blue, she said, “I just can’t do this anymore.” And she took the kids and bolted. She completely disappeared: I called her family and friends, but no one would tell me where she was.

When she finally called a week later, it was to talk about custody of Dylan and Brandon. She wanted me to sign a one-sided agreement that basically gave her complete control of the kids. I told her no way and, as soon as I did, the district attorney was calling my lawyer, saying that she had a witness willing to testify that I had been drinking in violation of probation. And we both knew who that witness was. I spent five more days in jail, but I got to keep my boys.

Last time in solitary, I had looked inward and resolved the problems in my fucking stunted mental development. Then, I had looked outward and resolved the problems in my stunted musical development, because prison was the one place no one could get into my head and manipulate me. This time, I used the time in solitary to solve the last missing piece of the puzzle: my fucked-up love life.

I made three promises to myself: The first was never to get married again after knowing someone for only four days. The second was to make sure I met someone’s mother before I married them, which would have saved me a lot of grief with Pamela and Heather because they were both pretty much younger versions of their mothers. And the third was that my next girlfriend was not going to be anyone who has ever been in a movie, magazine, or even, for that matter, Hollywood: she was going to work at a cosmetics counter at a mall in Northbrook, Illinois, or at a law office in Raleigh, North Carolina.

When I left prison, I knew there would be no third time with Pamela. I wasn’t going to be angry or vindictive. In fact, I still loved her and always will. We share two children and are both going to be in each other’s lives forever, so we might as well try to be friends. I also promised myself that I wouldn’t sell my pad, because I wanted our kids to always be able to come back to the house they were born and raised in.

I set up a new studio in the house the day I returned and went to work on another Methods of Mayhem album. The other day, I took a break to get some food from the market near my house. And while I was shopping, I happened to run into Nikki’s ex-wife Brandi. We talked for a while, and afterward, she called a mutual friend to get my phone number. She called yesterday and said she lived right around the corner. So I might have to fucking get in on that. After all, I’m Mr. Single right now. And, besides, I just looked through Nikki’s chapters in this book and read all about him and Honey.

S
trangely, with Tommy gone, the band entered for the first time in my memory a period of stability and we recorded the album that should have been the successor to
Dr. Feelgood, New Tattoo
. The high and dark emotions of the
Generation Swine
era were starting to resolve themselves: I had dealt with my father in my own way, won joint custody of my children from Brandi, put the band back on track, and reissued our old albums on Mötley Records, where they sold more than five times as many copies as Elektra had been selling.

But then I received a phone call from my brother Randy. He had found out where our sister Lisa was living: in a sanitarium in Santa Cruz. I was determined to see her. After all the heroin, cocaine, and alcohol, I was finally waking up to who I really was. I called my mom and asked her why she had always kept me away from Lisa, but all she could do was repeat over and over, “It was different back then.”

I hung up on her and called the clinic. “I don’t care what anyone says,” I threatened. “I’m going to come down there and see my sister.”

“What do you mean?” a friendly nurse asked. “Who told you that you couldn’t see Lisa? You can come see her whenever you wish.”

“But my mother told me Lisa didn’t want to see family.”

“You could have seen her any time you wanted. You were always welcome. We were wondering why you never called.”

“Can you do me a favor? I want to know more about her.”

They told me that her birthday was November 12, that she had Down’s syndrome, was blind and mute, and was confined to a wheelchair. She had an extremely weak heart and weighed less than sixty pounds. “However, she has her full hearing,” they said. “And it’s strange what you chose to do with your life. Because she loves music. All she does every day is sit by the radio.”

I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t believe that I had such an amazing sister who I could have seen any time in the past forty years. I was leaving for the next leg of the
New Tattoo
tour in a few days, so I told the nurse I’d visit Lisa when I returned.

Three days after I came home from the tour, Jeff Varner from my management office called and said, “The police are here. They want your address.”

“Well, give them a message from me,” I began the usual reply. “Tell them to fuck off. If they come to my house, they’re wasting their time. I won’t be there.”

“Look, they really need to see you,” Varner said.

“Well, I don’t give a fuck. I’m sick of getting arrested and going to jail. Besides, I haven’t done anything.” Actually, there were a lot of things I had done. Two days before, my car had been confiscated and I was thrown in jail for driving without a license. And before that, a security guard I had brawled with in Greensboro on the
Swine
tour had pressed charges, so maybe the cops were trying to extradite me to South Carolina.

“Nikki,” Varner pleaded. “Trust me, you have to tell them where you live and let them come over.”

“No, I’m not going back to jail. You know what, get rid of them and book me a flight to somewhere nice in South America. I need a vacation anyway.”

“Okay, Nikki,” he sighed. “Let me call you right back.”

My phone didn’t ring again for an hour. When it did, Vince was on the other line. He sounded fucked up, but not drunk. He was crying.

“Nikki, man, I don’t know how to tell you this,” he began.

“What? What?”

“They just found your sister dead.”

“Who? Which sister?” I wasn’t sure if it was Lisa or my half-sister, Ceci.

“I don’t know. But that’s why the police are at the office. They’re trying to tell you.”

I called the office and found out that Lisa had died of a heart attack that morning. I fell into an instant depression. I was angry at myself for postponing my visit, and I was pissed at my relatives for keeping her a secret all my life. I thought about how we had flown to San Jose on our private plane during the
Girls
tour for four sold-out nights at the local arena, shooting up coke before going on stage, then performing in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans and popping flashbulbs and horny girls and admiring guys. And the whole time my sister with Down’s syndrome was a mile away in diapers, lying on her back and listening to the radio alone. I could have tried to find her back then. I could have sent her birthday cards. I could have given her money and better care so that maybe she’d still be alive. I could have easily used the five hundred thousand dollars we made at those shows to start a Down’s syndrome fund in her name.

Always ready to do too little too late, I went to Santa Cruz, bought the most beautiful little casket I could find, and arranged her funeral. It was there that I saw my sister for the first and last time. Though her hands and spine were deformed, her eyes looked exactly like mine. I was with my mother, Ceci, and Donna, and I sat with them and cried the whole time. “I’m sorry,” I must have told Lisa a hundred times that night. “I will see you in heaven.”

Afterward, she was cremated. For Lisa’s sake I forgave my mother, took the urn back to Los Angeles, and built an angel statue with wings. I wanted to give Lisa the present of freedom and mobility, because she had never been able to walk. I bought a small plot of land at the top of a mountain and buried the urn underneath the statue there, so that wherever I am in Los Angeles I can see her and be near her and be reminded that I’m not alone in this world and that any day I may leave it to join her.